Howard Pyle on Rome

“As for Rome, I hate it,” wrote an ailing Howard Pyle to Stanley Arthurs on December 16, 1910. “I was in my room all the time but twice, and when I went out then I saw the Roman ruins, and not St. Peter’s and the great pictures and statues. The Moses was the only thing I saw. As for the Roman ruins, they are without shape, weather-worn, and channelled by the rivulets of centuries of rain. They are black in some places and white in others, and are, I think, ugly and disagreeable. I saw nothing beautiful in them, but only the weather-worn remnants of a past and forgotten age.”

Two Howard Pyle Exhibits

A little over a week ago, I finally visited the Brandywine River Museum in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, and saw their Howard Pyle exhibit, which just closed. It was absolutely worth seeing, especially since they put the bulk of their extensive Pyle holdings on view. A couple of things I’d never heard of or seen in person: sketches, studies, drawings, paintings, photos - a real cornucopia of Pylean goodies. And the show was supplemented by a fair number of works by his students, including pictures made under Pyle’s supervision: drawings of plaster casts, paintings of costumed models, and more finished illustrations. Scores of things. I only wish I could have seen it all more than once!

Luckily, the Delaware Art Museum is commemorating the centenary of Pyle’s death (and the subsequent founding of the Delaware Art and Library Society, which became The Wilmington Society of the Fine Arts, and, finally, the DAM) with a new exhibit.

OK, I admit I had fantasized of a show hung Louvre-style, with every bit of wall space covered with the hundreds of Pyles the museum has accumulated over the last 100 years. Only a relative fraction of them are on display, however.

But the presentation of Howard Pyle: American Master Rediscovered is unusually - surprisingly - fresh and sophisticated. Stepping down into the hushed yet huge gallery is like entering a cathedral, or at least a “Church of Pyle”: the overall lighting is low, but the spotlit paintings shine like jeweled reliquaries, or panels any “Old Master” would be justly proud of. I can’t help but echo what Pyle himself said after he first visited the galleries of Florence:

...as I stood among the pictures, I felt that there was a great glow of warm yellow light emanating from them and surrounding everything. They are a great lesson to any artist, and I hope and think I shall learn much from them.

Go look, bask, and learn.

What Did Howard Pyle Die Of?

What did Howard Pyle die of? Most contemporary newspapers reported that it was “heart failure” or “heart disease”. The more common notion - via those closer to the Pyle family - is that it was “kidney trouble” or Bright’s Disease - and his known symptoms are consistent with that diagnosis.

And still another, also kidney-related cause of death can be found in the “Report of the Death of an American Citizen” sent by the American Consular Service at Florence, Italy, to the U.S. State Department. This document - signed, by the way, by Leo J. Keena (1878-1967), the American Consul, and an acquaintance of the Pyles - said it was “uric acid poisoning”.

Coincidentally, Pyle’s brother Clifford died at 53 of “a kidney affliction” in 1910 and his brother Walter died at 59 of Bright’s Disease in 1919. So perhaps a genetic component was involved.

100 Years Ago... Today?

Howard Pyle died on November 9, 1911, in Italy at 4.30 a.m. - so it was still November 8th in Wilmington, Delaware, no?

“I am glad I am not dead”

Today is the 108th birthday of Miss Mary Asenath Ball, who sent a fan letter to Howard Pyle when she was seven years old. Her letter is lost, but we can glean what she wrote by reading Pyle’s reply:

In case Pyle’s writing is difficult to decipher, he said:

My Dear Mary Ball

I like your letter. I am glad you like my books. I wish I had written an Indian story. I did not write one. I am glad I am not dead.

I am yours truly

Howard Pyle

Pyle received Mary’s letter when he was in Florence, Italy, and he sent his reply sometime in April 1911 (I haven’t yet figured out if, on the postmark, the “1” refers to the day and the “17” to the hour, or vice versa). This is (so far) the last known letter in Pyle’s own hand - in fact, all the others sent from Italy were written or typed by his secretary, Gertrude Brincklé. And, of course, there’s a certain poignancy to it since Pyle died some seven months later.

Mary was the only child of Bertrand Emery Ball and the sculptor Caroline Cheever (Peddle) Ball (1869-1938), who studied under Pyle’s friends Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Kenyon Cox.

Howard Pyle Slept Here, Part 2

On September 9, 1911, Howard Pyle’s sons Theodore (22) and Howard Jr. (20) sailed on the S. S. Canopic from Genoa, Italy, bound for Boston and, ultimately, their fall semester at Yale. The next day, apparently, his sons Godfrey (15) and Wilfrid (13) took the train up to their school near Lausanne, Switzerland. “We shall be cut down then to the feminine skeleton of our family,” Pyle had said colorfully, if not a little morbidly, in anticipation of their departure.

A few days later - perhaps even one hundred years ago today! - Pyle and his wife, Anne, and their daughters Phoebe (24) and Eleanor (17), and his secretary, Gertrude Brincklé, went to Siena for a two-week stay at the Pensione Chiusarelli - seen here in a postcard of that vintage. (The place, by the way, is now the newly restored, three-star Hotel Chiusarelli - in case you’d like to sleep there, too.)

It was a welcome change for Pyle, who had grown to despise his summer residence, the Villa Torricella, in the hills above Florence. “It was more nasty than I can make you understand,” he said in a letter to Stanley Arthurs, after itemizing the “great high walls” surrounding it and the “very rough and very steep” roads to it that “were so filthy that you had to keep your eyes straight before you so as to see where you stepped,” as well as the long stretch of hot, dry weather and his own bouts of “sickness and blues.” In fact, Pyle confided, “I would rather have ever so sharp an illness than such dreadful mental depression as overwhelmed me.” In escaping to Siena, however, the family “all became prosperous and happy again.”

Cass Gilbert’s Woolworth Building Confession

Ever since he finished “The Landing of Carteret” for Cass Gilbert’s Essex County Court House, Howard Pyle hoped to get another mural commission for one of the architect’s buildings. It never happened. Despite their personal friendship - and the strings Gilbert pulled - their professional connection effectively ended when the painting went up in Newark in March 1907.

While idling in Italy some four years later, Pyle sent Gilbert the occasional, gloomy missive about his health and his prospects as a muralist. “If only some one of the libraries which you are building wanted decoration, I really think I could now make something of some account in the world,” he wrote on April 4, 1911. “But I have not yet been asked to do anything.”

Gilbert had bigger - or taller - fish to fry. “For the last year my time has been very much taken up by the skyscraper problem,” he wrote to Pyle on August 29, 1911. The skyscraper in question was the Woolworth Building, which, at that point, had “not yet risen above the sidewalk level.” The contractors, however, promised to have 55 stories up by January 1, 1912...

It will be a miracle if they do. The whole thing has been handled in such a way that we have been in a perpetual series of rushes for over a year and not until we had nearly completed three different sets of designs, each larger and higher than the one before it, did we finally get really under way and then in not less than ninety days we had to make the plans of a structure which will be, for the time at least, as advertised, the highest in the world. It is too bad I could not have had all the time that was spent on preliminary work to develop the final design and make the best of it, however, we have got a fine plan and I think a very interesting exterior. I do not like to put down in writing what I think about doing work so rapidly, for not only antiquity but posterity would stand aghast at the extraordinary proposition.

Unluckily for Gilbert, his words live on in his own copy of his letter to Pyle, now at the New-York Historical Society.

Luckily, though, the building lives on, too.

To the Villa Torricella, June 14, 1911

Villa Torricella, Summer 1911 (Eleanor and Phoebe Pyle in the distance)

One hundred years ago today - June 14, 1911 - Howard Pyle and his family took up a three months’ residence at the Villa Torricella in San Domenico, just north of Florence. He later described the entrance to the property - which his son Howard photographed - in a letter to Mrs. Charles Copeland:

You approach this little villa up a rising lane from the road. The road itself is framed on either side by high stone walls, over which the verdure peeps, and it is so narrow that it would be impossible for two teams to pass one another. An iron gate shuts us from this road, and as the gates are opened you see before you the stony rise of a path, and overhead an arbor of vines and flowers. When we were here in the spring it was full of wistaria, and the air was loaded with their fragrance. Now there are few, if any, flowers, but only the leaves and the vines twined overhead.

“I am growing so old now...”

Howard Pyle’s summer home in 1911: Villa Torricella, San Domenico, Florence, Italy

“This is now the first of June, and two weeks hence we shall be out in the country, and I long to get there and to enjoy the luxury of an American furnished house with Italian belongings, and the fine large secluded studio that I shall have. I hope I shall have work to do, but I am pretty far away for that, and I find it difficult to keep myself busy. On the whole it is a very good thing, for it stimulates my imagination, and braces me up to the old effort of making what I do tell as much as possible. But I am growing so old now that I find the strain of imagination is a little depressing to me, and I must keep up my great expenses or else rapidly fall behind.”

Howard Pyle to Stanley Arthurs, June 1, 1911

At the Stibbert Museum, May 14, 1911

STIBBERT MUSEUM, housed in the Villa Stibbert, at Montughi, about a mile and a half beyond the Porta San Gallo. Open on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday for a fee of 1 fr., and on Sunday mornings free. This collection, consisting chiefly of mediaeval armour and of costumes, was formed by the late Chevalier Stibbert, an English subject residing in Florence, who on his death in 1906 bequeathed his valuable collection to the city. The Museo Stibbert was formally opened in May, 1909. (from Florence and her Treasures by Herbert Vaughan, 1911)

Sometime between 9 a.m. and 1 p.m. on Sunday, May 14, 1911, Howard Pyle and an Italian friend visited the Stibbert Museum (or the Museo Stibbert) on the hill of Montughi in Florence. A few days later he wrote about it to Frank Schoonover:

It is really quite wonderful to see it. Many of the suits of armor are filled with models of the period. I think that which interested me perhaps more than anything else was a general of 1700, with a lace coat, jack boots and cuirass complete.* I never saw such an aggregation of interesting old things. Hundreds, yes, thousands of swords, crossed everywhere upon the wall, and bits of armor in all conditions, from the banged and ancient armor eaten through with rust, dug up out of the ground, to the finely polished, carefully preserved armor of the Italian nobles. All kinds of arquebuses and cross-bows, some of them inset with beautifully carved ivory or mother-of-pearl. All over the front of the building was inset with coats of arms and scutcheons, dating back to the thirteenth and fourteenth century. In front were some fragments of Venetian carved marble, and a very beautiful marble well.

(* If I can track down that general, I’ll post a link or a picture.)

On the Bargello, 1911

“As to the Bargello, which was once the judgment hall and the state prison of Florence, but which is now a Museum, there are treasures beyond calculation - ancient arms and armor, ancient saddles, ancient carved ivories inlaid with gold and colored, old medals, and jewels, a single one of which would make an American feel rich in the possession of it - all these are crowded into half a dozen great rooms, through which one passes, and where they are exposed to view to all who come. During the week the charge of admission is a franc to each exhibition, but on Sundays admission is free, and then they are crowded with the plain people of Florence, soldiers and bourgeois, who gather there to see them.”

Howard Pyle to Stanley Arthurs, February 16, 1911

On the Palazzo Strozzi, 1911

“The Strozzi Palace is perfect, and is even yet lived in by a remnant of the Strozzi family. All around the palace there are link holes in the wall with great rings where those who lighted the links assisted themselves to climb to them; and the building itself is as fresh as though it were built five or ten years ago.”

Howard Pyle to Stanley Arthurs, February 16, 1911

Howard Pyleiostro

“Mr. Pyle enjoys teasing the maids, especially Lina, just how he wants his egg, due minuti [e] mezzo; he will not learn Italian, found that inchiostro is Italian for ink, and adds iostro to everything.”

Gertrude Brincklé to an unidentified correspondent, February 4, 1911. (Not to be outdone, the Florentine servants addressed Mr. Pyle as “Signor PEE-lay.”)

On the Duomo di Milano, 1911

“I do not care very much for professional sightseeing, but while I was in Milan, the hotel being near the Cathedral, I went there to see it. It is my first sight of a real mediaeval cathedral, and it is certainly very noble and picturesque. The carved fretwork around the top looked like lace, and the ugly gargoyles around the sides, supported by rather nice caryatids add to the lacework effect. It was very splendid, and very large. I admired it extremely.”

Howard Pyle to Stanley M. Arthurs, January 25, 1911

Howard Pyle’s Early Impressions of Italy

Around Christmastime 1910, Howard Pyle was able to move his family from the cramped Pensione White “just on the outskirts of the slums” to “a suite of apartments in a very nice part of the city, where we shall be exceedingly comfortable, and where all the houses are new, and nice people live about us” at 6 Via Garibaldi. There, on December 28, he wrote about his as-yet ambivalent impressions of Italy to George Perkins Bissell, his friend back in Wilmington (who was also the brother of Emily Perkins Bissell):

I do not think an American of middle age who has spent practically all of his time in the United States should expect too much from Italy. As a rule, it is worn out and dilapidated, dirty and run down. Here in Florence, for instance, there are many old churches and many old palaces dating from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The churches are of black and white marble variegated with brown. They are dirty, stained and muddy with the dirt and dust of centuries: and personally I do not think anything of their architectural effect; but the insides of them are, in many instances, filled with treasures of art. The palaces every one look like prisons, and while inside there are fine carved pillars and some stunning stair cases, and court yards surrounded with coats-of-arms, yet outside they are gloomy and austere. They were nearly all of them built in the fourteenth century, and that was a time when every man’s hand was against every man, and every man’s hand against him: when the guards on the roofs used to shoot darts across the street at the guards on the other roofs, and every moment was the time of an assault. Many of these palaces are now converted into stores and market places, and a poor, homely, exceeding picturesque rabble down in the street below jostle and elbow one another; and there are butcher shops and drogherias (that is, rum shops) and there are bakers, and all sorts of nondescript tradesmen on the ground floors. This as you see is not at all like our well-made and well-arranged American life. It is very picturesque: but when that is said, all is said.

Howard Pyle at Santa Croce, December 20, 1910

“The Gothic church of Santa Croce, begun in 1294…was completed in 1442, except the façade, which was added 1857-63. The interior, 128 yds. long, with its widely spaced pillars and open roof of its nave, produces an impressive effect, enhanced by numerous monuments of famous Italians and by Giotto’s venerable frescoes in the choir-chapels (Morning light best).” - Baedeker’s Northern Italy



One hundred years ago today, on December 20, 1910, Howard and Anne Poole Pyle toured the Basilica di Santa Croce, around the corner from their temporary lodgings on the Piazza Cavalleggieri in Florence. The next day, he wrote to Stanley Arthurs and gave his impressions of some of the things he saw there.

“Yesterday Mrs. Pyle and I went to an old church which was started to be built in the Twelfth Century [sic], and which was only completed in the Nineteenth.”



“There are a number of things in it which are good, or fairly good, and one or two things which are extremely beautiful. Among these is a tomb, or rather, memorial, made by Donatello - beautiful figures, soft greys and gilt.” [I assume Pyle meant Donatello’s “Annunciation” in gilded pietra serena, a grey Italian sandstone.]



“The walls are decorated with pictures of the Giotto school, 14th Century and are interesting as being a transcript of that life. The Italians have not preserved them very closely, but have spread stucco-work over them which has only just been removed.”



“I think the things which interested me most were the tombs let into the floor, and the figures of knights and ladies in the costumes of the 14th and 15th centuries worn by passing feet so that you cannot see any detail, but still leaving enough to see the general character.”

Elihu Vedder Calls on Howard Pyle, December 10, 1910

On December 10, 1910, Elihu Vedder, the American artist and longtime resident of Italy, called on Howard Pyle at the Grand Continental Hotel in Rome.

But Pyle couldn’t see him: after dinner that day he had had an attack that spurred the family to fetch a doctor. His lingering illness, punctuated by sharp abdominal pains, pretty much confined him to his rooms: in fact, during his week-long stay in Rome, he ventured out only twice - and one of those times was so he could be x-rayed for kidney stones or gallstones.

Gertrude Brincklé and Phoebe Pyle went downstairs to meet Vedder in Pyle’s stead. Miss Brincklé wrote of the encounter the next day:

Elihu Vedder, the first personage whom we have seen abroad, came to call on Mr. Pyle last night, and Phoebe and I “received” him. He does not look at all like an artist, any more than Mr. Pyle does! He is a fat elderly man with a wondrous black worsted knitted vest, and a small brown skull-cap, and he talks a great deal about his book, apparently an autobiography or memoirs, of which both Phoebe and I were entirely ignorant.

Just a few weeks before Vedder’s visit, Houghton, Mifflin and Company had published his autobiography, The Digressions of V - in which Pyle gets only a passing mention (but waht else is new?).

Apparently, Pyle had known Vedder since the late 1870s. So far, though, I can put them in same place at the same time only once: on November 8, 1894, the two dined with Laurence and Eleanor Hutton at their house at 229 West 34th Street in Manhattan. A couple of days afterward Pyle spoke of “poor old Mr Vedder!” to Mrs. Hutton, “I suppose he enjoys his Italian life but isn’t it dreadful? Think of having to live in an atmosphere of art forever with no let up of nature and simplicity.”

Howard Pyle Arrives in Italy, December 7, 1910

The Sant’ Anna in Naples

In the rain and before dawn on December 7, 1910, the Sant’ Anna, carrying Howard Pyle, his family, and his secretary, Gertrude Brincklé, landed at Naples, Italy.

Pyle had already been unwell for several days and considered staying over in the port city, but, according to Miss Brincklé, he woke that morning “with light of determination in his eye” and decided to continue on to Florence as planned.

Fortunately, they met a Wilmington acquaintance, a Mr. Gawthrop, whose friend, Mr. Montefredini, helped get them through customs and onto a northbound train. After dark that same day, they arrived in Rome. But Pyle was unable to travel any further, so they found rooms at the Grand Continental Hotel, just opposite the Stazione di Termini.

“Mr. Howard Pyle...departed yesterday”

GOES TO PAINT IN ITALY

For a long stay in Italy, where he will have a studio in Florence, Mr. Howard Pyle, an American painter and illustrator, departed yesterday with Mrs. Pyle and their daughters, Misses Phoebe and Eleanor, and Master Wilfred [sic] Pyle, on board the Sant’ Anna, of the Fabre line. Mr. Pyle has just closed his art school in Wilmington, Del.

“I have commissions which will take up my time abroad,” said Mr. Pyle.

The New York Herald, November 23, 1910

Bon Voyage, Howard Pyle

One hundred years ago today, Howard Pyle took an early train from Wilmington to Hoboken, then a ferry around Lower Manhattan to the Fabre Line docks in Brooklyn, and at 1.00 p.m. (or maybe 12.17?) he sailed away on the Sant’Anna, pictured here.

Years later, his student Harvey Dunn recalled, “When we stood on the R.R. station platform at six o’clock the morning he and his family left he looked out over the city of his birth and his labors he held my arm in a strong grip as he said, ‘Write to me, Dunn’ and I know he didn’t want to go at all, somehow, and would never come back.”